


Intarsia

by Hermaline75



Series: Darcy, Loki, and the Yarn Store [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Break Up, Crossdressing Kink, Dating, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Human AU, M/M, Pegging, Sex Toys, This all sounds a lot kinkier than it is, Yarn store AU, of sorts, you're going to be very disappointed in me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-04 00:39:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 19,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1760921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hermaline75/pseuds/Hermaline75
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy decides to remove the 'with benefits' part of her friendship with Loki in favor of pursuing something more stable.</p>
<p>In theory it should be easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So here we go again. This one follows on pretty much immediately where 'Cables' left off.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who continues to read and leave feedback, I really do appreciate it.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Darcy gnawed on her lip, staring at her phone.

You could only pretend to have no battery for so long before that stopped being a valid excuse.

How long? 24 hours? More? She’d have to respond soon.

The trouble was what she responded with. A yes or a no? She wasn’t sure.

Steve was nice. Really nice. She didn’t know much about him really, but he’d done so much for his best friend. A guy like that had to be nice. And he wasn’t unattractive, not at all.

She just wondered when she’d be able to see him without Loki knowing.

And that concern sent a stabbing sensation straight through her stomach. Why should she care? She didn’t have to tell him. It was none of his business who she saw. But still, she wanted to keep this from him until she knew what it was.

If it was just a friendly request, that was fine. If it was a precursor to an actual date... that was different.

“I’m thinking,” Loki said, suddenly coming into his room where she was sitting on the edge of his bed, making her jump. “And I want to know if you can be out of the store as soon as we close on Wednesday and not come back for... oooh... two hours?”

She looked at him cautiously. “Why?”

“Well, you promised me a night of role play. How’s Wednesday for you? I just want to put a few preparations in place first.”

“What are you planning?”

“It’s a surprise...”

She frowned at him, but his face gave away nothing.

“Alright,” she said. “I can probably find a place to be.”

“You won’t regret it. I’m going to shower, but the coffee machine’s on...”

“One sugar, black, it’ll be on the counter when you get out.”

He kissed her temple. “Thank you.”

She waited until the shower was running before she replied to Steve’s text.

'Hey Steve sorry my phone ran out of battery. I’m free Wednesday at half past five?'

She only just resisted the urge to turn her phone off before he responded. The buzz of her phone against the counter as she stirred sugar into Loki’s coffee still made her start.

'That’s good for me. Just name a place.'

She texted back and set her phone down again before Loki came in, hair still damp, towel-dried. She felt sick seeing him take a gulp of his coffee, and the way his hair was leaving water marks around the top of the shirt he’d hurriedly pulled on.

She ought to tell him. She should tell him. She opened her mouth.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Never better,” she said.

The lie tasted bitter on her tongue.

Monday and Tuesday seemed a whirl to her. She typed up the accounts and sat through Tuesday knitting class in a state of blankness. It took her a moment to register anything and longer to react.

“Are you coming down with something?” Peggy asked her. “You seem a little off today.”

“I’m fine. Sorry, my mind is just... elsewhere.”

Loki smirked over his lace at her. His potential-nephew-slash-niece blanket was nearly complete, but he seemed to be putting off finishing it, preferring to try to decide which pattern to use for the edging and how he would alter it to deal with corners. He’d even spoken vaguely about learning crochet to handle it.

_He thinks I’m thinking about... about him,_ Darcy realized. _He thinks I’m wondering what he has planned._

Which was true, to an extent. She was curious, and her inquiries had met only knowing smiles and cryptic remarks. It was evident that she wasn’t going to get any hints at all.

Was it immoral to organize a date – _possibly not a date_ – for the same time that your boyfriend – _not boyfriend, he’s not my boyfriend_ – organized something that promised to be deeply sexual and kinky to boot? She didn’t even know anymore.

Maybe it wasn’t a date. Maybe it wasn’t.

She kept telling herself that until the second she walked through the door of the café she’d chosen and saw that Steve was wearing an actual button-up shirt and slacks, not the jeans and t-shirts she normally saw him in.

“Hey,” she said, trying to pretend she hadn’t been wearing her outfit all day.

“Hi,” he said smiling. “How are you?”

“Oh, fine.”

There was an awkward pause.

“So I know this might be a little out of the blue...” he began.

“Yeah, just a little bit.”

He laughed. She hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud.

“Sorry. But you’ve been a real... a real friend over the past months and I thought... I thought that maybe you might want to go to dinner some time.”

“So this is a date, huh?” she asked, trying to ignore the confused feelings in her chest.

“Not a real date. Unless... unless you think it is. But I’d much rather take you out properly.”

She took a deep breath. “Look, Steve... I’m in a bit of a complicated place right now. If you want to take me out then I feel it’s only fair to let you know that.”

“I’m sure I can deal with anything you want to throw at me. You know what I’ve managed to handle with Bucky after all.”

She looked at him and almost told him. She almost said. She almost explained the whole Thing between her and Loki and everything else that it entailed. Probably leaving out the pseudo-incestuous love he held for his adoptive brother.

But she didn’t.

“I don’t think we know each other well enough for me to tell you right now,” she said instead.

“Is that an invitation to get to know you better?”

She considered this. Loki had said, hadn’t he, that she should see other people, that she should seek out the monogamous and romantic relationship she wanted? That they could put the Thing on temporary hold if she wanted to?

She smiled. “Sure. Get to know me a little better and after that we can talk about a date.”

“Alright,” he said, sitting back. “How come you own a yarn store? Aren’t you a little young to have your own business in this economy?”

“Yeah. I sort of fell into it. My aunt used to own it and she... well, she needed to retire and I’d learned to knit at her knee and so I ended up with it. She just expected me to take it on, and it was the best offer I had. I don’t regret it though. It was a great decision, in retrospect.”

“Did you go to college? What was your major?”

“Political science, if you’d believe it. I’ve been really very lucky. I don’t think I’d be nearly as comfortable as I am if it weren’t for the Yarn Barn.”

He asked her questions for nearly an hour. Where she was from (Philadelphia), were her parents still together (no), what’s her favorite color (magenta), favorite book (don’t know), film (can we stop with the favorites please?), the name of her best friend (Jane), did she have brothers and/or sisters (no).

Eventually he nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Is that my cue to start asking you things?” she asked. “I didn’t make a list…”

“No, that’s OK. I’m sure you can find out anything you want to know over the next few months.”

“So you still want to take me out, huh?”

“Like I said, you’ve not managed to convince me it’s a bad idea. If you want to, that is.”

She looked at him. “There are still a few skeletons I’m not quite willing to unearth yet. Are you willing to accept that they might come crawling up one day, zombie style?”

“I think that’s a necessary risk in all relationships. I like you, Darcy. But don’t feel like you have to go out with me if you don’t want to, I’m happy to remain as we are if that’s better.”

“I would like to go for dinner with you. As a causal thing. Please, strictly casual. Like friends. And if something else develops, well…”

She let it hang in the air.

“I can work with that,” he said.

They agreed to meet for dinner the following week.

She didn’t know how to say goodbye to him. Hug? Was a hug where this was going?

He kissed her on the cheek. Friendly, but affectionate.

The walk back to the Yarn Barn seemed very long.

It wasn’t that she didn’t think anything could happen with Steve. He seemed stable and good and basically everything she’d ever looked for in a potential boyfriend. Which begged the question of why she was so unwilling to pause what she had with Loki who was not stable at all a lot of the time. And as for good… well, he was less inclined to morally questionable acts like impromptu haircuts these days.

The bell jingled when she stepped back through the door.

“You shouldn’t be here yet,” Clint said, looking up from his phone.

She stood dumbstruck in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you don’t ruin your surprise. And I’m here to ensure you don’t get too much of a shock when you’re allowed to go upstairs.”

“Why, what’s happening up there?”

He shushed her. “Wait and see.”

“It’s not… uh… It’s not going to have anyone else involved other than me and him, though, right?”

“No, don’t worry. Tasha and I are just here to help out. We’ll leave before you get through the bedroom door.”

“Alright.”

“And now I have to ask you a question. And I hope this doesn’t make things weird between us.”

“Clint, I once walked in on you blowing Loki behind the counter and I have slept with your girlfriend. I don't think it's possible for things to be weird between us.”

“Right, right, well then… What do you know about pegging?”


	2. Chapter 2

She blinked at him a few times.

“Is that a sex thing?” she asked.

“So you don’t know anything then?”

“Apparently not.”

“OK… OK… I was kind of hoping that I wouldn’t have to explain what this is because it’s… it’s, uh… yeah… OK, so imagine the kind of sex that me and Loki would have. That’s what he wants to do.”

She shook her head. “No, no, I do not want to do anal, we’ve had that discussion…”

They had. It had been part of an early set of boundary outlining. Loki had never questioned it.

“You won’t be the one… uh… catching… as it were…”

Considering the kinds of things she knew Clint got up to, he was really easily embarrassed.

“There’ll be… Loki has some special… er… equipment for you,” he said in a rush.

“What, like… Like a strap-on?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen Natasha use it on him before and… well, I don’t know the exact specifics, but there’s definitely some stimulation for you, if Tasha’s reactions to it are anything to go by.”

“So he, uh… He knows what he’s doing?”

“Oh, yeah. And he’ll be all prepped and ready for you, so you don’t have to worry about hurting him. Obviously I’m not giving you the full story because… well, basically he wants more than a quick fuck but I have faith in you that you’ll treat him with the care he deserves.”

This wasn’t making a lot of sense, but she didn’t have time to think about it too hard because Natasha came downstairs.

“He’s ready,” she said. “Be gentle with him. Unless he asks you not to be, of course. And count yourself lucky; we never get this kind of treatment.”

“I know right?” Clint said. “I wonder just what we have to do to get some of that.”

“You shouldn’t keep him waiting,” Natasha said. “And good luck. But I know you’ll do great.”

She took Clint’s hand and led him outside, letting Darcy lock the front door behind them.

She climbed the stairs, trying to figure out what on earth Loki could have planned. Was she going to find him tied to his bed? Did he want her to whip him or something? Because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that.

To her surprise the idea of a strap-on hadn’t sent her into a panic. It probably would have done a few months ago, but she had promised him something… what was the word he’d used? ‘Sordid’? No, ‘torrid’, that was it. Something torrid and filthy. And this was what he wanted.

There was no sign of him in the living room.

She walked carefully towards the bedroom, wondering exactly what she was going to find.

“Hi.”

Loki’s voice was soft, almost shy, not like she’d ever heard it before.

And he was…

He was…

“Wow.”

He grinned. “Is that a complement?”

He was lounging across his bed, looking like a sculpture. His hair had been slightly curled, definitely by Natasha’s hand. Tasha was probably also to thank for the full face of makeup. And the black satin corset pushing up cleavage that simply didn’t exist. And the silk stockings. And the garters. Those were almost certainly Nat’s.

Darcy didn’t know what to say. She stood silently in the doorway as Loki swung his legs off the bed and approached her, tottering slightly in platform heels that looked a few sizes too small. He’d always been taller than her, but now he positively towered. There was a degree of vulnerability there though. She wondered if it was genuine fear that she might reject this fantasy or if he was acting.

There was absolutely no chance of her rejecting this. She could barely believe what she was seeing as her eyes took in the lace underwear peeking out at the bottom of the corset and the tiny bows at the top of his stockings and the extra length of his eyelashes.

“Well? How do I look? Do you like it?” he lowered his eyes demurely to the ground and then glanced back at her face.

“You look incredible…” she breathed. “God, you look so hot.”

He smiled at that and took both her hands to place them on his waist, letting her feel the plastic boning of the corset and how soft the material felt under her fingers.

“How would you like to help me smudge my lipstick?”

She burst out laughing. He looked mildly perturbed.

“Darcy, come on. Play with me,” he said, pouting.

“I will. I promise I will, it’s just… wasn’t that line from ‘Bugsy Malone’?”

“It was from my heart. I’m deeply offended.”

“Aw, shush, baby,” she pulled him flush against her and tilted her head up until he lent down and kissed her.

His fingers set about undoing her blouse and skirt, batting her hands away any time she tried to even touch the laces of the corset.

“Leave it,” he said, running his thumb over her lower lip. “It makes me feel pretty.”

“It doesn’t fit you properly,” she said, unhooking her bra.

“That’s because it’s Natasha’s, and you may have noticed that she is a little smaller than I am. It still makes me feel nice.”

He cupped her breasts and walked her back against the wall before he yanked her skirt and underwear off. She felt strange, being naked while he was fully clothed – as fully clothed as one could be in lingerie anyway.

“Stay there,” he said, turning away and scrabbling under the bed.

He was definitely showing off. No one needed to arch like that, or toss their hair instead of pushing it back.

He turned wearing that predatory grin he suited so well and crawled across the floor towards her, pushing a box in front of him.

“Clint… Clint told you what we’d be up to?” he asked from the floor.

“Yeah.”

He ran a hand up her thigh and she briefly registered that he’d even painted his fingernails.

“And you’re… you’re up for it?”

“Sure. If it’s what you want.”

He nudged her legs apart and planted a kiss on her inner thigh, leaving a lipstick mark like a bruise. She obediently stepped into a harness when he produced it, letting him secure it around her. She bit her lip at what he produced from the box next. She’d seen a few dildos in her time, owned a few even. But this wasn’t like any she’d seen before. Anyone whose dick looked like this needed to see a doctor.

“This side is for me, and this side is for you,” Loki said. “Your side even has a specific clitoral stimulator, see? Let me just lube it up for you…”

“You’ve washed this since Natasha last used it, right?”

“Of course. I’m not an animal; I keep all my sex toys clean…”

She didn’t often use lube, but looking at the black plastic before her, she was glad that he was prepared. She watched his fingers work against the smaller of the two shafts before he looked up at her for the final nod. She put one foot on his shoulder to steady herself, getting another inner thigh kiss for her trouble, and he slid the toy into her with almost no resistance, fastening it firmly into the harness.

It felt strange, but not uncomfortable. And maybe once they got going she’d be more at ease.

He sighed happily, still on his knees before her.

“Would you mind terribly if I sucked your cock?” he asked, voice dropping low.

“It’s yours. You own it.”

“Fine, then would you mind if I sucked my cock while you’re wearing it?”

“Go ahead.”

There was something undeniably erotic about seeing Loki kneeling in front of her, his reddened lips sliding back and forth and hearing the slick sounds that increased as he pushed further and further forward, his hands gripping the back of her upper thighs. The action also made the toy move within her, just a little, not enough to really do anything but enough to tease and make her pant ever so slightly.

She wasn’t used to being against a wall with no one supporting her and before long she nudged Loki away with her thigh and crouched to bring their lips together again.

“Bed?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he replied, kicking the heels off. “How do you want me?”


	3. Chapter 3

“What’s best for you?”

“On my stomach.”

“Hm. Not yet. I want to enjoy you from the front first.”

He dutifully rested back on his elbows, back being held straighter than usual by the corset.

“Remember you’re going to have to replenish my lube before we really get started,” he said, handing it to her off the nightstand.

She wasn’t quite sure what to expect when she started to slide the panties off. He’d deliberately put them on after the garters so she didn’t have to worry about unhooking anything. His cock was visibly straining against the lace.

She tutted him as she tossed them aside. “Tasha’s going to be upset. You got her underwear all dirty.”

“That’s my underwear.”

She went very still. “What?”

He chuckled and drew her closer with his legs encircling her waist.

“You liked the idea of me wearing my ex’s things, so I went and bought some for myself. And I plan to wear them. And never tell you whether I am or not. You’ll spend whole days wanting to tear my clothes off and find out if today’s one of the days I’ve chosen for them. Maybe sometimes I’ll let you see just a hint of a lace edge or the merest glimpse of satin… If I’m feeling generous.”

He was so smug about it. So pleased with himself to have thought of a way to tease her. She snapped his garter straps viciously just to hear him yelp.

“You’re so cruel to me,” she said. “I really ought to punish you for it.”

And with that she pushed his legs apart and shuffled back down the bed, only so she could immediately lean forward and swirl her tongue around his cock.

She didn’t do this very often. Loki had politely told her that she wasn’t very good at it, and that he would much rather she didn’t as it clearly made her physically uncomfortable. But this wasn’t about trying to get him off, this was about torture. She wasn’t trying to make him come like this, she was just asserting her power as the author of his pleasure.

His breath hitched above her and she saw his back arching in her peripheral vision, straining against the corset bones.

“Finger me,” he said. “Please.”

She jerked back in surprise. “What?”

“Darce, I’m already stretched, you won’t hurt me. Just lube up a finger or two and stick them in me.”

“You are so… crude and unladylike…”

“Please. You managed it with Natasha. Just imagine I have a pussy and treat me the same.”

“I think the pipes are a bit different…”

“You’d be amazed.”

She huffed as she slicked up two fingers. “Are you going to be this demanding all night?”

“Yes.”

Laughing helped with her nerves as she moved up his body, supporting herself on one arm and reached between his legs with the other. Loki ran a hand through her hair and she looked up at him questioningly as she breached him.

He sighed, eyes falling shut, letting her appreciate the light dusting of shadow on his eyelids. That seemed encouraging and she started to move her hand, deliberately stroking and pressing against his flesh.

“You’re so warm inside,” she said without thinking.

“I know. It’s because I’m so hot for you. Press up a little more?”

She shifted, trying to do as he asked, almost certain her fingers weren’t long enough.

“Do you… Is it better to fuck guys or girls?”

She wasn’t sure why she asked. She was just suddenly curious.

“What you do mean?” His breath was slightly hitching now.

“Do you prefer pussy or ass, I guess? Which is better?”

“There is no ‘better’. They’re different but… I fuck people not body parts.”

“But which is your favorite?”

“My favorite?”

“Yeah. You must have one. It’s OK if it’s guys, I’m not going to be offended…”

“My favorite…” he said, deliberately. “Is when whoever I’m with ends up coming so hard they don’t even remember their own name. My favorite is seeing someone stop caring about anything other than the pleasure of the moment. My favorite is being the cause of that, however it happens, and letting them do it to me too.”

Darcy stared at him for a moment.

“Turn over,” she said, slapping his thigh as an afterthought. “I’m going to fuck you now.”

“Good and hard?” he asked, tipping himself onto his stomach.

“I’ll try my best.”

“I bet you say that to all the boys…”

She pulled the laces of the corset tighter, just for a moment, forcing him to gasp for air. The lube seemed cold and she tried to warm it up against the plastic with her hand before moving to kneel between Loki’s legs and pressing in.

The toy wasn’t too thick, but it was long and Loki moaned softly beneath her. He reached back to grasp her leg, making sure she was pressed all the way forward.

“Come on then,” he sighed, looking back at her over his shoulder and biting his lip. “Give it to me. Everything you can. _Pound me_.”

After a few experimental thrusts, she found an angle she liked. It made her half of the toy press against her clit and massage inside her perfectly. She grew more confident, sparks of pleasure rushing through her with every slam of her hips. If the noises Loki was making were any indication, this was working for him too. Which was good, because she was being pretty selfish, basically using him as a base point from which to relentlessly chase her own pleasure.

“Pull my hair,” Loki said suddenly.

“What?”

“Pull my fucking hair!”

She reached forward and grasped a thick handful, tugging back on it, forcing him to arch his back and brace himself with both arms. He yowled and she was almost afraid that she’d hurt him but it turned into a growl and she realized he was pushing back against her. She continued to pull, until he was kneeling up, panting and gasping as he took control of the movement. The satin at the back of the corset rubbed softly against her breasts, his stockings smooth where they touched her thighs, and every down stroke made the toy move within her. It was tempting to stay still, letting Loki bring her pleasure without realizing it, but she was determined to look after him.

Somehow she managed to find his cock, even though she couldn’t see around him properly, and set about jerking him off. He whimpered slightly and changed his movements, fucking up into her hand as well as back towards her. Darcy heard her own moans and pants escaping her lips. She tried to bite down on Loki’s shoulder to silence herself but he was moving too vigorously now and she just ended up scraping his skin with her teeth.

“More. More, bite me, mark me…”

Her teeth skittered over his skin, unable to find purchase, occasionally catching against his hair. Loki writhed and jerked at each touch and Darcy caught herself snarling in an almost primal way, her other hand skimming over the front of the corset where she held him, nails raking against the smooth material. Nothing was enough to break skin, but he’d have weals for a few hours at least.

She was close now, so close, just a little more and she’d be coming. The shudders of it made her buck slightly, totally out of rhythm with Loki but he seemed to like it anyway and after a few more jerks that sent shockwaves through her sensitive form, she felt him come in her hand. He brought her fingers to his lips, licking his own spend from her skin, apparently without thinking.

They stayed in place for a few moments, Loki’s chest moving in little cut-off gasps as Darcy rested her forehead against his back, pulling a few strands of hair out of her mouth. She found herself strangely fascinated by the way her own dark tresses and Loki’s even darker ones blended together against his skin, lying like a mantle on his over-heated flesh.

Finally he eased himself off the toy and pulled at Darcy until she was lying on her back in the sheets, moving her gently like she was a delicate and precious thing and not the woman who just fucked him. He deftly removed the toy but not the harness, placing it on the nightstand before rolling on top of her to kiss her hungrily.

“Good?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, good.”

He turned away briefly and unhooked the corset from the front, breathing deeply to fill his lungs properly. He dumped it over the side of the bed and rolled his shoulders.

Darcy traced her fingers down the indentations it left behind, harshly red against his skin.

He was beautiful like this. Hair tangled and the hint of mascara trails on his cheeks, shadowed eyes growing heavy, lipstick smeared and almost gone.

She ran her thumb over his lips, feeling the warmth of his happy sigh as he took it into his mouth, and suddenly knew that she had to end this soon.

They had to stop.

She couldn’t do this kind of thing anymore. Not with Steve on the sidelines.

Loki nuzzled against her hair as he fell asleep. Her stomach churned with guilt.


	4. Chapter 4

She was going to speak to Steve that Friday about another date, but he didn’t come to the small knitting class. Bucky arrived alone.

“No Steve?” she asked.

He shrugged and agreed. “No Steve.”

 _OK then_.

They got started as usual, Bucky’s music playing softly and the clicking of needles filling the air. She sat opposite him though, in Steve’s usual place.

“Is this awkward for you?” he asked after they’d been silent for 20 minutes.

“No. Why would it be?”

“Well. You and Steve. He said you went out and he… He said it could have gone better.”

“It wasn’t his fault. It was mine.”

“Really? Because I know Steve can come on a little strong.”

“No, I mean it. But I’ve had time to think and… Yeah. I think I’ll see him again.”

“OK.”

“Are you OK with that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She blinked at him a few times. “I don’t know. He’s your friend and I’m your...”

“You’re my friend as well. So now I have friends who are maybe going to date. Totally normal. I mean, we are friends, right?”

“I guess so, yes.”

“Well there you go. I’m not his keeper and he isn’t mine. He doesn’t need to put his life on hold for me.”

Darcy still felt incredibly awkward. Bucky seemed to sense this.

“You know, since we’re friends,” he said after a few moments silence. “You can talk to me about this stuff.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Nothing goes beyond this room. For either of us. It can be our little confession booth.”

She resolutely kept knitting, not even wanting to meet his gaze.

“Come on, Darcy. You know a lot about me. Surely we’re past the stage of things being uncomfortable.”

“I do know a lot, but that just confirms to me that my problems are nothing compared to yours, I have no right to feel so sorry for myself. I’m ridiculous.”

“Hey, now you... you stop that. My problems are my own and yours are yours. It’s not a competition. Anyway, I feel like you actually want to talk. I want to listen. People have... they’ve stopped really talking to me. I feel like everyone’s tip-toeing around me, like I’m broken. And I don’t want that, I want everyone to treat me like normal, not like I’m a... a victim. Please, talk to me.”

She sighed. It was hard to argue with that logic.

“You promise you won’t tell Steve?”

He nodded.

“Right. Basically. Uh... I’ve had a thing with someone else for... God, months now. We’re not together but it’s a regular thing. And so if I’m going to see Steve then I should stop that and be exclusive but I don’t want the other person thinking I’m rejecting them. We had a fight a few weeks ago and I don’t want him to think it’s because of that. But I haven’t told him about this potential thing with Steve and I feel like the longer I leave it the worse it will be when I do because I hid it from him, and... I can’t talk to anyone about it. My best friend is... she’s connected and so is basically everyone I know well enough to ask for advice and so I just feel like I don’t know what I’m doing and someone is going to get hurt and it’ll be my fault.”

Bucky sat politely while she finished. He pursed his lips slightly.

“Do you want to date Steve?” he asked.

“I’d like to give it a try.”

“Then... I’m sorry, but you definitely have to call off this other thing. I don’t want to say... Look, Steve isn’t possessive, not in a creepy way, but I think he would be easily threatened by someone else, especially if you had history. The biggest fight we ever had was because a girl broke up with him and he thought it was because she liked me better. Which was true, but I wasn’t interested.”

“When was that?”

“We were just finishing high school. It was ages ago. He’s mellowed since then. I’ve mellowed. I think he’s more serious about relationships now. Like he wants to settle down and get married, move somewhere nice. Probably try to get me to move in next door.”

“I think I told him I want something casual. I think I might have said that.”

“Still. You want to give it a shot, right? Then you have to consider how willing you are to give up your other... relationship? Whatever it is. I don’t think Steve’s looking for anything open. And if you can’t bring yourself to do that, then you have to tell Steve that you can’t date him.”

He was right, Darcy knew. But she couldn’t deny that she was scared. Scared to tell Loki. Scared that he’d be upset.

She didn’t want to upset him. She really didn’t.

She was unconsciously chewing her lip.

“Would you like my number?” Bucky said.

“What?”

“So we can call each other whenever. It’d be nice for me to have someone to call who isn’t Steve or my therapist. And then you can tell me all the stuff you don’t want Steve to know about. I promise I won’t tell. As long as you don’t tell him if I start complaining.”

“What’s to complain about?”

“You’d complain if your best friend didn’t trust you to make any decisions by yourself. He means well it’s just... I’m an adult. I can look after myself. Most of the time.”

“Hmm.”

She dutifully typed her number into Bucky’s phone and accepted his in return.

Neither he nor Steve came to knit class on Saturday. Darcy felt like her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth all day, especially as she typed up the week’s accounts.

She really didn’t want to say what she was about to say.

“Hey, Loki?”

“Mmm?” he replied, organizing the receipts.

“What would you say if… If I said that Wednesday might have been the last time we have sex for a while?”

He looked up at that.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Didn’t you enjoy it? You should have said.”

“No. No, I loved it. It’s just that… I might have someone else in my life soon.”

“Might?”

“I was asked out. And so… I went out on Wednesday. And I had fun and so I’m going to go out again.”

“Wednesday?”

“Yeah.”

Loki looked away.

“Who is it?” he asked. “Do I know them?”

“Steve.”

“Steve who?”

This was ridiculous. He knew exactly who. He was just making her say it.

“Rogers. You know, Thor’s friend.”

“Oh, him. Tall, blond, built… Nice. I can’t fault your taste anyway. Reminds me of a young Thor.”

“‘Young’? They’re the same age.”

“He reminds me of Thor in his teens. Just after the first time he fell out with Odin.”

She tensed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean that I think Steve’s just had his first taste of sadness. And that he might need a little comfort. That’s all. I don’t mean anything bad by it.”

“You don’t think he’s serious about me.”

“I’m sure he’s very serious. I was just saying what impression I have of him, that’s all. It’s fine. I’m sure he’s very nice.”

“He is.”

“Then I wish you luck.”

Darcy wished she believed him.


	5. Chapter 5

Jane called her first thing on Sunday morning.

“So, is it true? You and Loki broke up? What did he do?”

Darcy groaned. It was too early for this.

“We didn’t break up,” she said. “There was nothing to break up. We just... I’m going to see someone else. We’d already discussed the possibility, I told him, we’re...”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going back to being just friends?”

She was a little irritated now. “We never stopped being friends. We’re just not going to fuck anymore.”

She could practically hear Jane’s discomfort. She sighed.

“Sorry. Yes, we’ve broken up, if you want to put it that way. He didn’t do anything, I’m just seeing someone new. How do you know, anyway?”

“Loki does occasionally call. He rang Thor really early this morning and talked for ages. I got the gist of it. So, uh... Who are you seeing?”

“He didn’t say?”

“Thor said Loki said he couldn’t remember the name.”

_Well, that’s a lie, but alright._

“It’s Steve.”

“Steve? Like, _Steve_ Steve?”

“Yes, Steve. Why, is that surprising?”

“No, it’s just... I didn’t think he was your type.”

“And what is my type?”

“Apparently I don’t know, but you’ve never gone for someone like Steve before.”

“What, you have the monopoly on tall blonds, is that it?”

“No, I meant... I don’t know. Mature, I guess. Very serious.”

_This is weird. Loki says he reminds him of younger Thor, Jane thinks he’s too mature for me._

She found herself wondering which of them was right. Whose opinion she held higher.

“Anyway, congratulations,” Jane said. “Let me know how it goes.”

“I will, I’ll call you after our first date and give you all the nauseating details.”

“I look forward to it.”

It didn’t register with her until later that Loki had evidently deviated from his usual routine in order to call Thor. Maybe he just wanted to chat and just happened to mention it. After all, they’d learned their lesson when it came to not discussing things with Thor and Jane, right? He wasn’t... upset or anything. He couldn’t be. Could he?

She couldn’t tell. Which was both worrying and annoying.

What she needed was someone who knew Loki really well. Thor was out of the question because anything said to him would definitely get back to Loki. He might pretend he was the less dependent one – and to be fair, he was – but that was mainly because being less dependent than Loki wasn’t exactly hard.

Clint was probably not an option. She wasn’t sure if she could trust him, and therefore Natasha wasn’t suitable either because anything she said to Natasha would get to Clint and then probably on to Loki too.

She wished she had Tony’s number.

How could she get Tony’s number from Loki without arousing suspicion?

Unless...

The Yarn Barn had a website with a guest book, a comment section and a space for potential customers to ask questions. She knew Tony had sent a nonsense question as a joke a few months back. But if she replied... it would go privately to his email. Which she knew for a fact sent notifications to his phone.

She was nervous after she sent the message. Just ‘Hi, it’s Darcy, please call me, here’s my number’ but still. What if he was with Loki? What if he said something? This was fraught with risk, but there was no going back now.

Her phone buzzed in her hand.

“Hey, Fluff Ball,” Tony’s voice from the other end. “I was wondering how long before I’d be hearing from you.”

“Really? Why?”

“I was going to ask you nearly the same question. What did you do?”

“Me? Nothing!”

“You must have done. Loki’s antsy as fuck. And he won’t talk about it. Just said he was annoyed with you and he was going to need ‘distracting’ from it. I’m going to have bruises on my hips and they’re your fault. Not that I’m necessarily complaining about that…”

Darcy sighed heavily. She seemed to be sighing a lot this week. “I’m going on a date with someone else. I stopped the Thing. Loki said it was alright but he’s been on the phone with Thor and basically telling on me to Jane and... I don’t get it, he said it was fine!”

Laughter. “Oh, Darcy, I think we both know you can’t trust Loki when he says things are fine.”

“So, what? I can’t date?”

“No, no, I’m sure it will be fine. He’ll come around, he’s just... I don’t know. He’s upset.”

“Why?”

“Well, not that he’s told me anything, but I guess he feels like you’ve cast him aside. Found a new model.”

“But he said!” she insisted. “He said he didn’t mind. What am I supposed to do?”

“You just need to act like he doesn’t mind. Ignore all the pettiness that’s about to come your way. Don’t let him get to you, don’t let him play games with your head, just go about your business. He’ll get bored of trying to rile you up and he’ll calm down.”

“But what if he doesn’t? What if he leaves?”

“He won’t.”

“But it’s what he does, isn’t it? He gets upset and then he runs and Thor will... Thor will blame me. And then Jane will stop talking to me. And he’ll leave the store and I’ll be all alone again.”

“Calm down. He hasn’t run yet. And Thor’s smart. Way smart. Even if something happens, which it won’t because Loki’s actually starting to act like a grown up, he’ll listen to both sides. He’ll know you didn’t do anything wrong. Everything will be fine.”

“So... that’s your advice then? That I should just pretend I don’t notice?”

“Yeah. It’ll be hard, and he’ll definitely know what you’re doing and try to make you react, but you need to understand that this is about winning for him. It’s about making you the bad person when he has no right to. But if you make it painfully obvious that you are not interested in fighting with him, he’ll stop. It’s no fun winning against someone who’s not playing. Just ignore it all. Let it wash over you like a horrible sludgy wave of passive aggression.”

She considered for a moment. “Will he stop caring about me? Will we fall out really badly?”

“Maybe. It’s a risk. But then again, he has a habit of changing his mind. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, maybe he will but then he’ll start caring again one day out of nowhere. Don’t worry about it. You’ve been honest with him. You’ve done nothing wrong. He’ll figure that out and your friendship will survive, I’m sure.”

“I haven’t even been on the damn date yet,” she grumbled.

“When is it?”

“Tuesday evening.”

“Right. Well, I’ll do you a favor then. I’ll come round on Tuesday afternoon and you can make a big show of giving him the afternoon off and I’ll try to make him calm down a bit and you can go on your date knowing that he’s occupied.”

“You’re going to have sex with him all afternoon, aren’t you?”

“Do you have a better plan?”

She didn’t.

“Alright. I’ll act surprised when you show up.”

“Great. Be strong. I believe in you.”

“Thanks, Tony. I’m glad someone does.”


	6. Chapter 6

She was not ignoring Loki.

That much was true.

What she was doing was ignoring the way he was subtly letting his displeasure out. ‘Forgetting’ how she liked her coffee. Bringing her a different yarn from the one she was looking for. Having to be asked three times for anything.

Tony’s advice was proving difficult to follow, though not impossible. Darcy pretended everything was fine. In fact she really wanted to talk this out but she knew that if she did that somehow Loki would twist her words into being a deliberate criticism and she’d feel terrible about it through no fault of her own.

It wasn’t even true to say that Loki was reverting. Sure, this was exactly how he’d behaved when they’d first met, when he was angry at the world and rudderless and generally a handful. No, he wasn’t reverting; he was only acting this way towards her. It was a punishment because she had upset him by daring to take something he’d said as true.

She hoped Tony was right and that he would calm down, sooner rather than later. She could handle a couple of days of this, maybe, but not much more. She wondered if this is what teenaged Loki had been like and therefore what Thor had put up with for most of his life.

By the time Tuesday afternoon rolled around and she’d spent two hours in the most horribly awkward knit class of her life, she was practically praying for Tony to show up. The relief on her face when he finally arrived was probably glaringly obvious but she tried to seem like she was just glad to see a familiar face.

“Can Loki come out to play a little early today?” Tony asked, ignoring the small huddle of older ladies commenting on his entrance.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, trying her best to sound reluctant. “I guess I can manage class by myself for a little while. As long as someone brings me a coffee first.”

She sipped it once they’d gone, Tony whispering in Loki’s ear as they left and gaining a slow smile for whatever he’d said. Sugar. Loki knew she didn’t take sugar. She drank it anyway out of misplaced spite even though he wasn’t there to see her do it.

Loki’s plan had almost worked, assuming discouraging her from seeing Steve was his plan. Part of her wanted to call off the date and just go home and flop. But another part of her really wanted to try hard for this potential thing and make a real effort, just to annoy Loki.

Which wasn’t the best basis for a relationship ever, but she’d seen worse.

As it was, she spent a lot of time on her appearance, trying for sophisticated but sexy. And then she remembered that Steve knew what she normally looked like and liked her anyway. Still, she was happy with her choice of outfit and make up when she left the house.

Steve seemed to like it too. His smile went from nervous to wide when she leant in to exchange cheek kisses.

“I think we maybe got off on the wrong foot,” he began once they’d sat down.

“No, it was my fault, I’m sorry. I’ve sorted a few things out. And I’ve decided that I would like to go out with you. In a dating way. So this evening is a great start, I guess.”

“Well, I’d like to apologize for springing it on you. Start over?”

“Yeah. Start over.”

Darcy had been on plenty first dates in her time, but it was nice to go for one with someone who wasn’t a total stranger. Someone who she was actually vaguely comfortable around, instead of someone she was actively trying to impress. She could almost have forgotten that this was a romantic meeting if it weren’t for the way she noticed Steve’s eyes occasionally flicking down to her lips.

For all she felt she knew him, having spent several hours in his presence, as the time went on she realized she didn’t really know Steve at all.

“You’re an artist? Cool.”

“I’m a graphic designer, yeah. Mostly logos, flyers, that kind of thing. Freelance, so getting paid is a total nightmare. You’d be amazed at what people do trying to avoid paying their bills.”

“How do you make them pay up?”

“I threaten to get the law involved. Very motivating.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

Steve told her all about art school and how he’d started as a more traditional artist before moving into design.

“I still do my other stuff though. Put it into local places, sell a couple here and there.”

“I’d love to see it some time. I can’t imagine being creative enough to do stuff like that.”

“What are you talking about? You’re creative. What do you think knitting is?”

“Well, I guess. But you make your stuff from your own brain, I follow patterns and instructions. It’s not the same.”

“It’s no less valid as a creative outlet though. That’s my philosophy. It doesn’t matter what you do, or how well, as long as you enjoy it.”

“Surely there has to be a point where you draw the line between art and not art?”

“I try not to. Creating is creating. Doesn’t matter if I like it.”

“Hmmm. I guess not.”

She knew there would be a kiss at the end of the night. She managed to put it off until they were immediately outside her front door.

It wasn’t bad. It was cautious, sure, but not tentative. His lips were warm and if there was a little awkwardness in terms of tongue application, well… that was just a normal thing when you’re kissing a new mouth.

“So I’ll uh… next week?” Darcy stammered.

“Sure. Next week. I’ll call you.”

She called Jane very briefly to let her know it had been nice.

“‘Nice’? That’s all?”

“What do you want me to say? Yeah, it was nice, it was a nice first date.”

“Are you expecting a nice second date?”

“Yes. Next week sometime.”

“Good. I’m glad. And you’re… You and Loki are… fine?”

She couldn’t talk to Jane about this. Too close to Thor, too close to Loki. So she lied.

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“If you’re sure.”

She wasn’t. She wasn’t sure at all.


	7. Chapter 7

Loki was not on the shop floor when she arrived at the store. She was almost certain that he was deliberately late to annoy her.

And like hell was she going upstairs to look for him. She got everything organized herself and breathed deeply, determined to be calm whenever he finally surfaced.

She heard a cry from upstairs. It could have been pain, but probably wasn’t. She paused momentarily and then reluctantly went up. It was a ruse. It had to be.

The apartment door opened nearly silently and Darcy paused for a moment. She could hear something…

She took off her shoes, keen to move as quietly as possible, tiptoeing her way to the edge of Loki’s bedroom door.

His bedroom where he had tied Tony up with a scarf. One of hers actually, one that she’d made. And Loki had tied it around Tony’s wrists and attached him to the headboard and was now riding him like there was no tomorrow.

“Fuck!” he yelled, overly loud. “Fuck, yes, Tony…”

It really didn’t look like Tony had any control over the situation. Darcy could see his face, locked somewhere between pleasure and discomfort, knowing he was being used for Loki’s own purposes and not for any kind of mutual gain.

Loki threw his head back, eyes shut, moaning and sobbing. It would have been hot in any other circumstance.

_He did this deliberately. He’s trying to upset me, trying to make me… what? Jealous? Realize what I’m missing?_

She stood for just a moment, just peeking around the doorframe as she saw Loki descend onto Tony’s mouth, gasping against his lips. Her eyes flicked down to the floor, spotting lace underwear lying there. The lace he’d bought for her. A stab of betrayal threatened to pass through her heart.

_He put that there deliberately to upset you. Don’t let him. You are stronger than this._

She shrugged to herself and went back downstairs.

It wasn’t even as though she was angry. She was more… disappointed. Upset that he was trying to punish her. Loki had timed that, he’d waited until he knew she’d be in and then he’d made enough noise to attract her attention. He probably knew that she’d seen. Assumed that she had. Well, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.

Tony sheepishly came downstairs ten minutes later, wrapped in a towel.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

“I tried, but… well, I think it’s going to be a long burn off. When he’s fun he’s really fun but when he’s not it’s really… it’s not great. As you know. And you know you can always call me if it gets too much.”

“Thanks. You better head back up. He’ll be out of the shower soon.”

He duly disappeared. Loki would be down momentarily and she needed to be ready for him. They’d played this game before and before she had won. She’d been the one to turn him around, he’d fallen before her.

And if he really wanted to get difficult… well, she knew more about him than most people did. Maybe it would pay to casually remind him of that fact.

God, she was getting to be as bad as him. This is how he must think. All power and control and who knows more about the other and therefore who was the more dominant. That was the real reason she’d ‘won’ all those months ago, because he’d made a mistake and let his guard down and revealed something to her and that had made her powerful in his mind.

“How was your date?”

She didn’t even look at him. “It was fine.”

“Is that all? Did he let you down in the bedroom? Wasn’t it good?”

“We didn’t sleep together.”

“Shame.”

_Do not rise to it. Don’t let him do that to you._

“Would you like coffee?” she asked instead.

“Yes please. I’m dreadfully thirsty; I’ve had an energetic morning.”

She tried her best to keep her hands under control as the machine spluttered and heated. Tony arrived and whispered that he was going to hang around as long as he could, try to act as a buffer. He squeezed her upper arm.

“So, tell me all about your hot date,” he said, louder, so Loki would definitely know he was downstairs.

“Not much to tell. He’s nice. Artist. Lots of potential. We’re going out again next week.”

“Well, keep me informed. I love a romance.”

“What about you two?” she asked, ignoring Loki’s lack of thanks for his coffee. “You have fun last night?”

“And this morning.”

“Good.”

Loki was regarding them both with narrowed eyes. Suspicious, almost. But she was pretending not to notice and Tony was pretending not to know and anything Loki said now could safely be brushed off with accusations of paranoia.

He stuck close to Tony for most of the day, speaking quietly to him, barely acknowledging Darcy’s presence. But that was better than continuing to antagonize her, so she acted like everything was normal.

Eventually, around two in the afternoon, Loki sighed dramatically.

“Yes?” Darcy said.

“You’re uniting against me, and it’s not fair.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really? Because you two seem pretty friendly for people who don’t really know each other.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to be nice to your hook ups.”

“Hey!” Tony said. “I’m his longest-running hook up. I’m king of the hook ups.”

“That might change if you keep being mean to me,” Loki said pointedly.

“How exactly are we being mean to you?” Darcy asked, like she didn’t know.

Loki didn’t say anything. Eventually she crumbled under the force of his scowl.

“Look, Loki,” she began. “I get that you’re annoyed. I do, I get it, I get that you are upset that I am seeing someone else. But firstly, it’s nothing to do with you or anything you have or haven’t done, and secondly, we agreed that I could stop the Thing if I wanted to see someone else. You said it was fine and I really don’t understand why you’re being such a…”

“What?”

“Why you’re being such a dick about it. You said it was fine.”

“Yeah, well, I never expected it to actually happen now, did I?”

She stared at him.

“So, what? You thought I’d never find anyone else? You thought… you didn’t think anyone else would be interested? Or you thought that I liked the sex so much that I wouldn’t leave for a chance to have a proper relationship?”

“Darcy…”

“No, don’t you even speak to me right now. How dare you? How fucking dare you say all that about how I ought to date and that you thought I should see other people and then act like I’m the bad person when I assume you mean what you say? And you have the nerve to treat me awfully because I’ve gone against you?”

He couldn’t meet her gaze and she suddenly couldn’t bear to be in his presence.

“Where are you going?” Tony asked when she snatched up her bag and headed for the door.

“Out,” she said. “Mind the store, Loki. It is your job, after all.”

She left with the sting of tears in the corners of her eyes.


	8. Chapter 8

It was only once she’d walked three blocks that she realized she had no idea where she was going. It was the middle of the day, where was she even going?

Her feet pounded the sidewalk as she kept walking, resolutely refusing to cry in the street.

Eventually she found herself outside a vaguely familiar building. The college where Jane researched. Some things you just needed your best friend for.

“I’m here to see Doctor Foster?” she said to the man at the desk, trying valiantly to keep her voice steady. Jane had kept her unmarried name for professional purposes.

“Who?”

“Doctor Jane Foster? She’s… a researcher?”

“Try the third floor.”

Darcy climbed the stairs and headed along a badly carpeted corridor. None of the names on the doors seemed familiar. Eventually she came to one where they had been scrawled in ballpoint pen on a piece of paper taped to the door, including ‘Dr J. Foster’.

She knocked.

“Yeah?” a man’s voice from within.

She opened the door. Jane was sitting at one of three desks, a pile of books and papers surrounding her like a nest.

“Darcy? Are you alright?” she asked, looking up. “What’s happened?”

“I’m sorry,” Darcy said. “I’m sorry to disturb you but…”

She glanced at the young man at the other side of the room.

“Bruce, if anyone comes looking for me, tell them I’m in the library,” Jane said.

“Sure thing.”

Jane bustled Darcy out of the office and into what seemed to be a stationery cupboard further down the corridor. She locked it from the inside.

“This isn’t the library, Jane.”

“I know. ‘Library’ is our code for ‘busy’. No one can actually find anyone in the library. But never mind that, what’s happened to you? You look like you’ve been crying.”

Darcy sniffed a bit at that, but felt a lot more in control now.

“Remember when I said that Loki and I were fine?”

Jane nodded.

“Yeah, we’re totally not fine. He, uh… He’s upset that I’m seeing Steve. And he was being really weird and I called him out on it and basically… Basically he told me that the only reason he said he would be OK with me seeing other people was because he thought I never would. And so I stormed out and now I’m here and I… I just don’t know what to do.”

“Hey, it’s alright. You’ve not done anything wrong.”

“But what should I do? I can’t live like this, but I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Are you angry?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I’m insulted more than anything.”

“Frankly I think Loki needs to apologize.”

“I don’t even want to talk to him right now. But he lives above my business. He’s my employee,” she ran her hands down her face. “God, I should never have slept with him.”

“Maybe you should… fire him?”

“No. No, I couldn’t do that. He’s genuinely good at what he does, he’s good for the store. I just want everything to go back to how it was, before any of this, before the Thing…”

“Unfortunately time is a linear progression in our universe.”

Darcy was at least able to smile at that. Jane had a sense of humor, of sorts. It was just a little odd.

“And since you can’t go back, you have to go forward,” Jane continued. “You don’t want to fire him, and you want to be friends again? Then I think you guys need mediated. We just did a training course on it, trying to minimize workplace arguments or something.”

“What is it?”

“It’s… well, it’s kinda like therapy, I guess? It’s talking things out with a third party. If we get Loki to sit down and actually talk about this, maybe we can sort it out.”

“And how on earth are you going to get Loki to sit down and talk?”

Jane smiled slowly and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

“We’ll trick him,” she said, pressing buttons and placing it against her ear. “Hey Thor, it’s me. Yeah, hi. No, I’m fine, listen, I need you to get Loki to come for dinner tonight… Yes. Yes, I’m sure… No, I’ve not hit my head… Look, I’ll explain why later, I just need you to get him to our place. OK. Yeah, great. OK. I love you. Bye.”

A few hours later Darcy found herself hiding with Jane in her and Thor’s room, listening as Loki came through the door.

Thor had been quite angry when he found out Jane’s plan. Not because of how sneaky she was being, but because it was necessary in the first place. Darcy was now totally convinced this was how teenage Loki had been; Thor seemed to have an idea what to do.

Trouble was, she was remembering now that Thor’s technique had seldom worked previously. That Loki had often run away when facing down his brother.

She tensed when she heard the deep rumble of Thor’s voice, a quiet retort from Loki and then a sigh. More from Thor. Quite a lot from Thor. Pause. Long pause. More sighing.

Then “Darcy, get out here. You and my brother need to talk.”

Jane gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

When she opened the door, Loki bolted, and she heard his growl of frustration to find the front door locked.

Thor dumped his keys loudly on the table and Darcy winced. Loki sidled back and threw himself into a chair, not looking at anyone.

“Well, isn’t this familiar?" he mumbled. “It’s like being twenty years old again.”

Darcy only barely resisted the urge to run away back into the relative safety of the bedroom but she managed to stand her ground as Thor looked from one to the other.

“Alright,” Thor said eventually. “Now, I won’t pretend to fully understand your arrangement, but I do understand that it’s come to an end and you need to come to terms with that. Both of you need to accept that your feelings are valid but taking them out on each other will not help you.”

“He started it,” Darcy said, not caring how childish she sounded. “I was totally honest.”

“Oh, were you?” Loki rounded on her from his chair. “Because I seem to recall that you went on a date without telling me. It was only when things looked like they might become serious that you decided to let me know. And now you’re telling on me to my big brother? Fantastic…”

She felt herself blush. “I went on one date, which beforehand I wasn’t even sure was a date. So I didn’t mention it. Besides, it’s none of your business who I see.”

“I just don’t think your new boyfriend would be too happy to learn that you screwed me into the mattress last week, pretty much immediately after seeing him.”

“Oh, you’d have rather I came back and called off your little game when I knew you’d worked so hard on it?”

“I’d rather you hadn’t acted as though everything between us was the same. I’d rather you’d told me as soon as you even thought about going dating so I’d have known there was someone else to be taken into account-”

“Oh, because cheating is so against your moral code, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve ever broken up a couple or six…”

“Enough!” Thor said. “Both of you. Alright, Loki, so Darcy should have told you that she was seeing Steve. You’re right, on that front, but that’s no excuse. She may have been a little over-cautious, but can you really blame her when you react like this? You can’t claim to be happy with a situation when you aren’t.”

“Oh, I don’t know, there are plenty of _unpleasant situations_ I’ve managed through just fine.”

Thor moved back as though struck and Darcy distinctly saw Loki moving his leg away from him under the table. Jane was in just the next room and this was not the time for Loki to be playing unwanted footsie with his brother.

“Loki, stop,” she said, trying to prevent him causing damage. “I’ll admit, I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry.”

He paused. “So you should be.”

“Loki…” Thor had the voice of a long-suffering victim of Loki’s moods.

“Fine. I’m sorry that I said I didn’t think anyone else would want you. I’m sorry that I was a dick.”

He didn’t sound sorry at all, but Darcy moved to sit in the chair next to him anyway. He didn’t move away from her presence. That was something.

“I have food in the kitchen,” Thor said. “Are you going to be friends again and get through dinner?”

Loki hummed noncommittally, but Thor seemed to take that as sufficient. He collected Jane from their bedroom and they went to the kitchen together, Jane eyeing Loki warily. Too many stories of stuff like this happening before, probably.

“I really am sorry,” Darcy said quietly.

“And I really didn’t mean it,” Loki said. “It’s just… the last time something like this happened to me, the other person and I ended up in a real mess and it was a horrible time and I don’t want to go through that again.”

“You know I wasn’t trying… I wasn’t trying to go behind your back it’s just that I… I don’t know. I don’t know why I was worried.”

“I do. It’s because you knew something like this would happen.”

He seemed so dejected and she realized why. Because Thor knew how he’d behaved. He was embarrassed because Thor was disappointed in him. She could almost see the cycle stretching back through the years of Loki managing to get Thor angry and taking the attention he got for as long as he could before it burned him and then running away to wait for it to cool off.

“Do you want to talk about… about the time before? To make sure I know not to say the wrong thing?”

He looked across at her and patted her on the shoulder. “Not here. Later.”

They made it through dinner in more comfortable silence. Darcy hugged Jane for a long time at the door.

It was nice to know she always had someone to help her out.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor warnings on this chapter: there are extremely brief discussions of domestic violence and of a dubiously consensual sexual situation.

Thursdays were still dull at the store. It seemed no matter what they did, it just wasn’t a busy day. They usually got some of the other stuff done, ordering in yarns and bill paying and the like.

Darcy wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of Loki’s ex who had hurt him so much. But how did you go about that? How were you meant to even start that conversation?

At least he was back to relatively normal now. They were acting the way they always had, before all of this.

“Aren’t you going to ask me to talk?” he asked at lunchtime.

“I was waiting for you to be ready. If you don’t want to, it’s fine.”

“What, and have you walking on eggshells around me? No thanks.”

He sighed.

“OK, the worst thing about it was that I was really young at the time. I got with her when I was about 17. And it was great to start off with. Thor had gone to college and I was all alone and I hated everything and she hated everything and… basically we ran away together. She was my first everything, you know? First kiss, first time, first long term thing… We were together on and off for about three years. I thought I might actually get over Thor with her.” He let out one short laugh. “Yeah, more fool me.”

“What was she like?”

“She was… pretty awful. But then again I was pretty awful, like, the worst I ever was at that point, so I guess we matched. But she was incredible as well, you know? She was beautiful and crazy and infectious and… Yeah, I thought she was pretty great at the time.”

“Did you love her?”

Loki stared off into the distance for a while.

“In a way, yes,” he said eventually. “I mean… the whole Thor thing was still there, bubbling under my skin, and that’s never going to go away and I’ve accepted that. But yeah. In a different way, I did. Of course, everything I felt then seemed amplified because everything does when you’re that age, and then you start to get old and you see the world differently and you… I look back now and I know that we were never going to work out. We broke up once a month for a while, always crawling back to one another. Until that just… stopped being an option for me.”

“What happened?”

“I knew she was sleeping with other people. And yeah, it hurt, it hurt a lot, but I tried not to let it get to me too much because I figured, hey, sometimes when I run my fingers through her hair I’m thinking of a totally different blond person so maybe it’s justified. But one of her... people, lovers, whatever, got violent. She came to me and we decided to leave, we dropped everything because we didn’t really have a choice. I took her to the only safe place I knew. Which was Thor’s place. And uh… yeah…”

“What?”

Loki scraped both hands through his hair and looked up at the ceiling.

“She fucked him,” he said quietly.

Darcy thought her jaw was going to hit the floor.

“What? Thor? She… no. No way.”

Loki shrugged, still looking upwards.

“He was drunk at the time. For all I know, she deliberately got him wasted. Probably did, actually. I’d managed to get a part time job, working shifts, came home one night… and there they were, on the couch. Not even in his bed, on the fucking couch, where she knew I’d see… I heard them first. I stood with my key in the lock, and I heard her moaning and I burst in, angry that she’d brought someone back to Thor’s place and… and it was him. And she glanced across at me and smiled as she rode him, looking me right in the eyes, and she said…”

He sighed and put his head in his hands.

“She said ‘Oh, Thor. You fuck so much better than your _little brother_.’”

“God. What a bitch.” Darcy said.

“No, no, she was trying to get back at me, you see. Because I’d… OK, I was a total asshole and I know that now, but at the time I basically told her it was her own fault that her guy had hit her. I said that if she’d just stuck with me and not… uh… slept with other people behind my back then she would have been safe and that I was sick of clearing up her mess. Obviously, that’s a very toned down version. I was not a nice person back then. I was far, far worse then. In retrospect I can see exactly why she did it because it really wasn’t her fault, what happened to her, and I understand that she was angry and that she wanted to hurt me and so… Thor.”

“Do you think she… Do you think she knew that you loved him?”

“Oh, god no. Thor didn’t even know at this point. I think she was just going for the whole brother thing. Anyway, I dragged her out, yelling and snarling and telling her never to come back. Threw all her stuff onto the street after her. Ending with her underwear. I wanted her humiliated and embarrassed but she just laughed at me. Picked herself up, and left. And it burned me so much, it hurt that she’d had the one thing I wanted and could never have and she didn’t even realize what she’d done…”

Darcy didn’t know what to say.

“Anyway, so this is also the infamous ‘Thor locking me in’ story that never has context. He tried to apologize because he thought I was angry that he’d slept with my girlfriend. And after I’d stopped laughing hysterically because it was just _so funny_ that he thought exactly the opposite of the truth, I decided that I would leave and he decided I wouldn’t and we were in a stalemate for a while where he had the keys and I was hiding in the bathroom and then I remembered his apartment was ground floor and climbed out the window. Lucky I was still wearing shoes. And I didn’t go back for two days.”

“What did you do?”

“I walked around and I went into bars and I spent all the cash I had on me and I slept with about five people. Not at the same time. But I wanted to feel anything less painful, I wanted to shut all of it out. So yeah. That’s why I’ve been such a dick these past few days, and I know it’s stupid because you’re not her but… I don’t know, just the idea of you not telling me something brought it all back. I don’t like not being told things.”

Darcy sat in silence for a while. It was a mad link to have made, but it had obviously messed Loki up a lot at the time. She remembered the conversation they’d had about Bucky a few weeks previously: ‘the most innocuous thing can act as a trigger’.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

He sniffed. “She went to jail briefly a while ago, I heard that much. Theft. Assault.”

“Jesus!”

“It’s not that surprising. I mean, we did a bit of petty crime when we were together, it was nothing new. I just got lucky, never got caught. But, yeah. My parents moved. She’s never tried to contact me, and it’s been nearly a decade so I guess she never wants to see me again and I... I feel guilty about that, I suppose. I wonder if we could have worked it out and been happy and if she’d be in a better place. Then again, for all I know, she’s found someone else and she _is_ happy. None of my concern, we’re done. But, you know. The past has a habit of sticking around, in the recesses of your brain. And sometimes I wonder what happened to her, between times.”

“What was her name?”

Another lengthy pause. “Amora. Her name was Amora. And I haven’t said that name in quite a while.”

Darcy hesitated before placing her hand on his shoulder.

“For what it’s worth…” she said carefully. “I promise not to try to hide anything from you again.”

“It’s fine. You weren’t to know. I’m sorry for pushing my difficulties on to you. It’s not fair of me to do that, and I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

“We all make mistakes. I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have slept with you once I’d decided to date Steve. It was unfair on you and on him.”

“Will you tell him?”

“Oh, god no. It was a mistake. I’m not even telling him about us yet. It’s too early to talk about that kind of thing.”

“What, previous relationships? Or sex?”

“Both, maybe? We’ve only been on one date. It’s not like he’s my boyfriend or anything yet.”

“Early days, Darce. I get it. Lips are sealed.”

_What a way for our conversation about honesty to end…_


	10. Chapter 10

Bucky came by himself to their individual knitting class.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve asked Steve to stop coming. He’ll still come on Saturdays, I think, but… Well, I want you to feel comfortable talking to me and I think it will be easier on both of us if he’s… y’know. Not here.”

“How did you ask that?”

“Oh, it’s fine, I just said that I’m starting to feel OK about going out by myself more often now and so I want to go to more places alone. He seemed to buy it.”

“You mean it’s not true?”

“I’ve been doing stuff for myself for ages, but he likes to feel needed and to see me make progress so he thinks it’s a good thing. He says you went out again and that it was good.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

“So you stopped your other thing?”

“I did.”

“Good. How was doing that?”

“Troublesome. There was fighting and arguing and… anyway sorted now.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. It’s mostly his business. Old wounds reopening.”

“Well, I know all about that…”

Darcy started. “God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“Oh, not that. I do have a history from before I lost my arm, you know…”

“Do you want to dredge any of it up?”

“Not really.”

She was glad he said that. She wasn’t sure she’d cope with more dark pasts. Not that she could even imagine Bucky having the same regrets Loki had. He’d almost certainly never blamed someone for abuse or thrown someone out to fend for themselves. Part of her was curious, but she wasn’t going to push. Never push, that seemed to be her motto at the moment.

“Will you teach me how to finish the scarf?”

That was surprising. Bucky had been steadily working on the scarf for ages.

"Casting off? Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It might get cold soon. I want to wear it.”

“OK. Well, this could be difficult for you, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to use your left hand a bit more than when you’re knitting straight. So you might want to tighten your grip a bit more often.”

“Alright.”

“It’s really simple. You knit two stitches as normal. And then you’re going to put your left needle through the front of the first stitch and pass it over the next stitch. And you just keep on going all the way across, passing the previous stitch over each new one”

She wished she hadn’t said it was simple. Bucky’s face was a mask of concentration, holding his right needle almost vertically as he tried not to drop any stitches. The whole process took him nearly twenty minutes. Darcy was careful not to offer help; he obviously wanted to do this himself.

“What do I do with the last stitch?” he asked eventually.

“You need to break the thread, leaving a tail, and pass it through and then pull it tight.”

She watched as he inserted one of his artificial fingers through the final stitch and pulled on the other end until the yarn snapped. That level of tightness would have hurt her. She found herself wondering just how much Bucky did now that would have hurt his original hand.

“Right, nearly done,” Darcy said, standing up. “You know how to sew, right?”

“Uh… a little? Like I’ve put a button back on a shirt, that kind of thing.”

“This’ll be much easier,” she said, handing him a darning needle. “You’re just going to sew in the loose ends of yarn, and it will be done.”

It took him several attempts to thread the needle but his sewing technique was better than he’d given himself credit for.

And there it was. His first completed project. A little lumpy and with varying tension, but all his. No one else had made a single stitch.

Darcy felt like a proud mother. A proud mother whose child was a 30-something soldier. He grinned at her as he wrapped it one-handed around his neck in several loops, to compensate for the length.

“How does it feel?” she asked.

“Soft. And nice, because I made it. It’s something definite, you know.”

“Yeah. That’s the reason I love doing it too. So do you think you’ll start something else now?”

“I think so. I have a few ideas. I’ll show you tomorrow, if that’s OK?”

“Of course.”

“I’m pretty excited about it. It’s uh… It’s something that I think will be good for me but it’ll do some good in the world as well.”

“I’m intrigued.”

“Yeah. I hope Steve will do it with me. So he doesn’t feel left out. And it’ll be nice to boss him around a bit, if he agrees.”

“You sound like you’re planning something big.”

He considered this. “It’s big to me, yeah.”

He hugged her as she prepared to lock up. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but it was a little odd. Like he hadn’t hugged in a while and was trying to remember how it went. The prosthetic was solid against her back, but he was careful not to squeeze her too hard.

“Thanks,” he said when he let go. “I didn’t think this would help me, but I’m glad I was wrong. I’m glad I let Steve talk me into this.”

“Me too.”

“Well, yeah, you got dates out of it.”

“Yeah, but I got a new friend as well. That’s more important right now. But don’t tell Steve I said that.”


	11. Chapter 11

This was going to be the first time she’d seen Steve since their date, and she was looking forward to it.

“You look fine,” Loki said out of nowhere.

“What?”

“I can see you, checking that your hair is OK because _he’s_ coming over. You look fine.”

“Shut up…”

At least she knew it wasn’t Steve he objected to now.

Bucky seemed slightly nervous when he arrived.

“I suddenly remembered something from when I was out… you know, out on tour. That there were these care packages. And they had scarves and hats in them sometimes, handmade, with little notes in there, and you could wear them in your down time, a few folk I knew had them. So I’ve been online and I’ve found the group who makes them, and it’s all done by volunteers so… I figured I could knit and do good at the same time.”

“Are they accepting hand-knits right now?”

“They’re always accepting them, look.”

He gave her a print out from a website.

“‘Our goal is to send 50,000 every year!!’” she read. “‘We definitely need your help.’ Huh. Well, it sounds promising. Do they have any rules?”

They did. There were specific dimensions to be met and it was recommended that colors remain neutral, but other than that it seemed to be free reign.

“I want to learn stripes,” Bucky said. “I think that’s something I could do.”

“OK, well, if you want, Loki can show you our remainder yarn and you can pick some out.”

“Oh, so I’m paying for yarn now?”

“I’m afraid so…”

He smiled at her and went off to choose his colors.

Steve watched him go.

“This has been really good for him,” he said. “Did he tell you that he told me not to come to his individual class anymore?”

“Yeah, he said that he wanted to do more for himself. It’s good.”

“To be honest, I think he just keeps me around because he knows I like to help.”

“You’re his best friend. He wants to spend time with you. He must have missed you when he was away.”

“Yeah, but he had friends over there. You know, before the… the incident. Has he told you that he wants to visit their parents? I’ll drive him, he hasn’t found the time to get a car with the specifics he needs. Or he hasn’t wanted to. But I won’t go in. It’s private, you know.”

“No, I get it.”

“He got letters at the beginning from them. Trying to get in contact, ask him if he wanted to talk, if he could tell them anything about… the other soldiers. It took him a long time to start writing back. And now I think he’s going to arrange to meet one of their moms.”

“I hope he manages to bring her some comfort.”

“Yeah. I mean… It was his old captain that forwarded them. Thought it might help. And I think it will, given time.”

He stopped speaking then as Bucky returned from the cash register with four skeins of chunky yarn in gray and deep blue.

“This is on me,” he said, laying two down in front of Steve. “Loki says we can probably make two scarves each from this, if we use big enough needles, so I think we should get started.”

It was quite obvious that he knew they’d been talking about him, but he didn’t seem to mind. To be fair, he was probably used to people talking about him now. At least he could be sure they weren’t saying anything bad.

“Are you busy tonight?” Steve asked suddenly. “I’ve got some chicken needs eaten at my place if you want to come for dinner.”

“Oh, uh… I guess. This is usually the night I do the week’s accounts, but they can probably wait.”

“I’ll do them,” Loki said from the other end of the table.

He was puzzling over a crochet book, using some scrap yarn to try to figure out what he was doing before he made the edging for the baby blanket. For once Darcy wasn’t trying to help. She knew only one crochet technique, the most basic one for tidying cast off edges. Loki wanted something a little more decorative.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yeah. I know what I’m doing. I’ll call if I need help.”

She figured that was as close to a relationship blessing as she was going to get.

Steve’s place was really nice. It reminded Darcy of the first time she’d walked into Jane’s first ‘adult’ apartment and realized that this girl really had her life together. It was only later that she learned Jane was just good at faking it.

She didn’t think Steve was faking. He had furniture that looked like it might last, a dish for his keys, actual art on the walls. A lot of real physical art actually.

“Are these yours?” she asked, looking at some of the works. “Like, did you make them?”

“Some of them, yeah. Some of them I bought from friends, or they gave them to me.”

“OK, well, don’t tell me which ones you did, I want to guess.”

She studied the artworks in the hallway, trying to figure out what Steve’s style might be, what techniques and materials he would favor. Vibrant block colors she dismissed pretty quickly; she felt Steve would be a little more understated. The same went for the delicate watercolors as well; there was something pastoral about them that she couldn’t see Steve trying for.

Eventually she stared down a deceptively simple pencil drawing of a male figure, half profile. Careful lines and light shading, hardly any background.

“This one,” she said, certainly.

“Well, that’s cheating,” Steve said.

“Why?”

“Because that’s Bucky.”

She looked again. Shoulder-length hair, swept slightly back, the faint hint of late-teenaged stubble sketched in around his jaw, crooked half-smile. She could see who it was now, but the reserved cropped-haired Bucky she knew was somehow worlds away from his adolescent self.

“I drew that right towards the end of high school,” Steve said. “Just after he told me he was going to join up.  It was in my portfolio for ages and when I finally decided to change my pieces around because my skills had improved so much, it was pretty much the only one I kept. Sold most of the others from that time.”

“It’s beautiful.”

That was all she could think of to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The group Bucky is talking about really exist. I don't know much about them, they just showed up on a Google search for helpful knitting and seemed a good fit. You can find them over here: http://opgrat.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/scarves-for-troops/


	12. Chapter 12

Steve was not a good cook. Dinner was edible, just about, but it had the distinct air of someone who didn’t entertain often.

Not that Darcy was telling Steve this. Instead she just said that next time she’d cook for him, internally adding that she could show him what spices were.

She turned down his offer of a drink though.

“Better not,” she said. “Since I’m driving home.”

“You are? Where’s your car?”

“Outside my store. I have an owner’s parking permit.”

“Does it let you park overnight? You could always leave it there and stay here. If you wanted.

She hesitated and his eyes widened.

“Not like that,” he clarified. “I wouldn’t… I mean, unless you want to… But I wasn’t asking.”

“It’s fine, I know you weren’t. If it’s alright for me to stay then sure.”

“I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. I’ll sleep on the couch if you want.”

She laughed. “No, it’s fine. We can sleep in the same bed, I’m not afraid of you or anything.”

“OK.”

There was an awkward pause.

“But like… if we’re going to talk about sleeping together then I think it’s only fair to warn you that I tend to wait quite a while. Don’t be offended, it’s just how I am. I take a long time to build up to it.”

He looked concerned. “You don’t think I’m just trying to get a quick lay out of you or anything, do you?”

“Not at all, it’s just… Some previous boyfriends have been impatient with me. But I like you and I feel like we’re not coming into this totally blind and so I felt I should make sure.”

“OK. It’s not a problem for me; you take as long as you want. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Whenever?”

“Yeah. I mean I might need a moment’s notice but if you said you were ready now I’d carry you off to bed this very second.”

She tried to ignore the part of her brain that said that would be better than trying to finish dinner. That was Loki’s influence and she wasn’t comfortable with that.

She smiled at Steve instead. “It’s not a morality thing. I just need to trust someone first.”

“It would be fine with me either way. It’s your decision. But thanks for letting me know where we stand.”

He had shop-bought dessert, cheesecake. Darcy tried to disguise how glad she was to see it.

They retired to Steve’s couch afterwards.

“So if you didn’t own the Yarn Barn, what was your lifeplan?” he asked.

“God, I don’t know. I mean up ‘til the point I started working there for my great aunt, I was working the same job I had been during school. Just paying the bills while I looked for something else. And I had been for… God, nearly three years? Then two just working in the store and then I owned it. I don’t know what I’d be doing. Probably something really dull.”

“It must be good though, running your own place.”

“Yeah, it’s great. It was hard at first, just because my Aunt basically treated it more as a hobby than as a business so there was a lot of administration backlog and I had to sort out a lot of stuff before it started to work, but it’s better now.”

“So much better that you can employ someone.”

She tried not to pause too long before responding. It felt like her history with Loki was somehow written on her skin for Steve to read at any moment and she wasn’t ready to share that with him yet. Maybe not ever. She couldn’t help thinking that it was going to be difficult for her to explain and for him to understand and accept.

“Well, you’ll remember Loki from Thor’s wedding, right? He needed somewhere to work and live, I needed someone to work for me and there was an apartment above the store anyway so… it all worked out.”

“I remember that Thor was pretty stressed about it to start off with…”

“Was he? I don’t know, I think Loki had had some difficulties in the past, that’s all. Typical over-worrying big brother.”

The lies fell so smoothly from her tongue and she couldn’t help the slight lurch in her stomach.

“How did you meet Thor?” she asked instead.

“Oh, it was years ago. I was still at art school and we worked together as servers for a while. I mean, it’s difficult not to like Thor but we really hit it off and we’ve been friends ever since.”

Since he was a few years older, Darcy hadn’t known Thor during his college days. It was strange to imagine him as a waiter. She didn’t really understand what Thor did, some kind of office job, but his work wasn’t that important to him. He preferred it as just a means to live, not a reason to. It was probably why he’d rejected the family business in the first place.

“What about you?” she asked, trying to steer the subject into something more comfortable for her. “Did you have a backup for art school or was that it?”

“That was it, really. I don’t know. I guess I would have followed Bucky into the army. Not that I would have lasted five minutes.”

He laughed humorlessly.

Darcy found herself again unsure what path to take. She was a good listener, but she never knew what to say to make people feel better. He put his arm around her and she let her head rest against his shoulder. Maybe she didn’t have to say anything really.

She slept in one of his t-shirts, massively long on her. They kissed slow before going to sleep, and she noticed Steve’s care to keep his hands from wandering, trying not to make her uncomfortable. These were better kisses than their first attempt, less pressured and with more time to learn each other.

She was glad she’d decided to stay over.


	13. Chapter 13

He’d unconsciously thrown an arm around her waist in the night. The weight of it was comforting and she shuffled backwards into his embrace as she woke up, enjoying the warmth of Steve’s flesh. She took in what limited sight she had of his bedroom from her vantage point.

Compared to the rest of his apartment, which had art pretty much everywhere, this room was positively bare, only one or two pieces. She was too far away to examine them closely, and wasn’t wearing her glasses anyway. There was also a large floor-standing sculpture in one corner, or it might have been some kind of plaster cast.

Steve stirred behind her, automatically tightening his grip.

“Hey,” she breathed.

“Hey…”

“Just admiring your sculpture.”

“Oh, god, don’t. This is where I keep all the art I’ve made that I don’t want just anyone to see.”

“Why not?”

He took a while to reply. “OK, so I know I said that no art is bad, but this is my bad art. But I keep it around to remind myself how far I’ve come. And because… I don’t know. Artistic endeavor is always a goal in itself.”

“Well, I like it.”

“Can you figure out what it’s supposed to be?”

She looked at it critically. She hadn’t actually realized it was supposed to be anything in particular.

“I think I’m at the wrong angle,” she tried.

Steve laughed. “It’s an eagle. It was meant to be a beautiful eagle perched on the branch of a lightning-struck tree. But I didn’t know how to make plaster properly, so even though my prototype looked alright, the cast mould just… didn’t work. And it was for assessment so I didn’t have time to make another one so I pretended I meant for it to look like that.”

“Did you get away with it?”

“No, they knew I was bullshitting. And that’s when I decided that maybe sculpture wasn’t for me. Not on this scale anyway. But you can just about see the outline. It’s just a very chubby eagle.”

If she looked hard she could indeed just about see the sweep of a wing. She thought. Maybe.

“What are the other works then?” she asked, rolling over to lean on his chest.

“Other things that didn’t turn out right, but that I finished. Oil painting. Etching. I’d like to try them out again sometime, see if I can improve, but I don’t tend to have the hours or the funds spare. I’m good at what I do because I’ve worked at it, and these help keep me grounded if I get frustrated with things. But yeah, I don’t want just anyone looking at them so they stay out of places people would see.”

“So I’m not ‘just anyone’ then?”

“No. Anyone I’ve kissed is allowed back here.”

“Hm. Then I better ensure my privileges don’t expire, huh?”

Steve’s thoughts on working to get better at something definitely seemed to apply to kissing too.

Eventually he broke away.

“I kinda have to work today. Urgent design brief came in on Friday, needed by Tuesday. I normally wouldn’t take that time scale, but I know the guy and I know that he’ll pay up and bring return business so I should probably move before I’m tempted to just laze around all day.”

“That’s OK. I should probably go get my car. Can I shower before I leave?”

Even Steve’s bathroom had art in it. She tried to decide if any of it was his work. There were a couple of pieces there that she thought might be, but couldn’t be sure.

He also evidently wasn’t expecting female company, if the collection of manly shower gels was any indication. Nothing wrong with a girl smelling a bit masculine, though she made a mental note to bring some of her own stuff if she was going to stay over more often. The thought of this becoming more regular didn’t worry her as much as it might have done even a few months previously.

She wasn’t sure if that was a sign of her being comfortable around Steve or just more comfortable in herself. Maybe both somehow.

She just about managed to drag his comb through her hair, wondering why she didn’t have a hairbrush in her bag, and walked out of the bathroom to see him bent over a drawing desk, sliding rules and set squares moving under his hands. She stood and watched him work for a moment, waiting for him to pause before walking up behind him to wrap her arms around his shoulders, not caring how damp her hair was against his.

“Don’t get up,” she said, “I’ll let myself out.”

“Alright. Are you free on Wednesday evening? There’s a band playing downtown, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but, yeah, if you want to…”

“I would. That sounds great.”

“I might see if Thor and Jane want to come too. The bassist is… well, he’s not a former waiter from where we worked, he still does that on the side of his music, and I don’t really know him that well, but his band are actually not bad so I look out for them playing, especially free gigs.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Great. I’ll send you the details. Or I’ll just come pick you up at the store around five? We can have dinner and then go. If you want.”

“Sure. I’ll see you then.”

She kissed him once more before heading for the hallway.

Her heart sank when she saw a piece of paper tucked under her windshield wiper. A call to explain that her parking permit was valid didn’t seem like a fun activity for a Sunday afternoon. But no. It was from Loki.

‘3am and your car is still here.  
I finished the accounts and went out.  
Hope you are just staying at Steve’s and haven’t been murdered.  
Text me and let me know.  
Loki  
xxx  
P.S. If the car is gone and no text I will report it stolen. This is your warning.’

Darcy smiled as she read it over. It was nice to be cared about, even in the strange way Loki showed it. She dutifully got out her phone and sent off a simple message – ‘Still alive, see you tomorrow’ – and went home, feeling happier than she had all week. Sweet almost-boyfriend, date lined up for next week, Loki back to normal.

_This can’t possibly last. My luck won’t let this last._

The hope that it would clung around her like perfume.


	14. Chapter 14

She called Bucky later that day, just to see how he was doing. His answers were pretty short and she wondered if he’d been sleeping. Or if he thought she was just calling him out of duty rather than actually because she wanted to talk to him. It wasn’t an unpleasant phone call though, and she placed it alongside her other successes of the day.

The Tuesday knit class wasted no time in teasing her as soon as they found out that she’d been on a date. Loki encouraged them with the news that he knew they were going out again the following night. Darcy found she didn’t even mind though. She didn’t have to hide this. It was a liberating feeling.

“That’s the privilege of a heterosexual monogamous relationship,” Loki said when she mentioned it that evening. “No one’s going to make you feel bad about it, so long as you’re not dicks. Speaking of which, I hope you’re remembering that this is your third date.”

“Yeah, why?”

“Third date means sex.”

She scoffed. “No, it doesn’t. For a start I’ve already let him know about my trust thing and it’s all fine.”

“Well, good. I’m proud of you. It’s very mature to be able to have that discussion.”

She looked for the joke, tried to spot the sarcasm. There didn’t seem to be any.

“Thank you?” she tried.

He nodded once.

So that was that then. No more snarky comments. No more subtly veiled jokes. Just actual friendship.

Weirdly, she felt like they’d never been more honest with each other. Not even when they’d been sleeping together. Maybe this was what unbridled friendship with Loki was like. No second-guessing, no agenda and no subtle little digs. She wondered who else had this and was willing to bet it was relatively few people.

Wednesday couldn’t come soon enough, especially when she found out that Thor had volunteered to cook for everyone, and be the designated driver as well. His food was always hearty and filling and she often wondered how Jane remained the size she was. Loki put it down to energetic sex.

This also meant she could borrow some of Jane’s makeup before they went out.

“So things are good between you guys?” Jane asked, as she tried not to smudge her mascara.

“How do you mean?”

“You and Steve, you’re getting on OK?”

“I’m dating him, aren’t I?”

“Alright then. I kind of guessed you must be, since you were coming to this.”

“What?”

“This band. They’re terrible.”

“What? Steve said they were pretty good…”

“No, if I know you, you’ll think they’re awful. I assumed you’d do your research first.”

“Then why are you coming?”

Jane shrugged. “It’s nice to go out with other couples sometimes. And Thor inexplicably likes them too. I think it’s nostalgia really. Remembering their college days.”

“I’m sure a 45 minute set won’t hurt us.”

She was wrong. Technically, they weren’t a bad band. It was just evident that they didn’t really know how to play in small spaces. Which was odd, seeing as Darcy couldn’t imagine them ever playing in larger ones.

Steve and Thor sang along to some of the numbers. It was cute, in an embarrassing way. Darcy couldn’t make out the lyrics very well, and at points she wondered if they were even in English. But she and Jane clapped politely at the end of the last song anyway.

There was a pause while the next band set up and Steve offered to replenish everyone’s drinks. Darcy checked her phone discreetly while he was gone.

“That’s weird,” she said. “I have five missed calls from Loki.”

Thor reached into his pocket. “Huh. I’ve got a few as well. I’ll just nip outside and see what he wants…”

Jane drained the last of her gin and tonic.

“You see?” she said. “Not exactly to your tastes, I don’t think.”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe they sound better recorded…”

Jane laughed. “You’re just saying that because you want to agree with Steve. You want to be careful doing that. He’ll start buying you their merchandise. I learned my lesson when I told Thor I really enjoyed watching ‘America’s Got Talent’ with him. We saw the tour, Darce. The TOUR.”

“OK, I’ll be careful next time.”

She was still smiling when Thor returned, looking very grave, so serious that her face fell.

“Darcy,” he said quietly. “You need to come outside. I’ve got some bad news.”

“What is it?”

“Jane, get Steve. I think we have to leave. Right now.”

Jane hurried off, and Darcy clutched her bag as Thor led her out of the noise of the bar and into the cold air beyond.

“What is it, Thor?”

He took a deep breath. “The first thing is that Loki is fine. He’s absolutely fine.”

The panic took her then. She grabbed his arm helplessly.

“What’s happened? Tell me.”

Thor stared down at her as though his next words physically pained him.

“It’s your store, Darcy. It’s on fire.”

He managed to catch her when her knees buckled.

It couldn’t be true. She’d been there just a few hours ago and everything had been normal. This didn’t really happen.

She nodded absently when Thor promised to drive her there straight away.


	15. Chapter 15

The silent drive there didn’t convince her that this was actually happening.

The plumes of smoke and blue flashing lights surrounding the street didn’t convince her.

She was distantly aware that Jane was speaking to her, but that didn’t matter.

Not when she was desperately scanning the group of onlookers for a familiar dark head.

Steve tried to catch her when she threw off her seatbelt and hurtled out of the car the very second Thor stopped, afraid she’d hurt herself.

“Loki?” she called, running towards the crowd. “Loki?”

A figure turned and moved towards her, grunting slightly when she barreled into him, locking her arms around his waist and babbling against his chest.

“I thought… I thought you’d be hurt or burned or…”

“Ssh,” he soothed her, stroking her hair. “It’s alright. I’m fine, I wasn’t even home, I came back to find… well, this.”

Darcy looked at the blackened buildings for the first time, a sob escaping her chest when she saw even the sign at the front of the store was bubbled and destroyed. So fast. It had all gone so fast.

“What happened?” she asked.

“They think it was an electrical fault in the store next to yours. The whole block’s been damaged. Apparently it’ll be structurally sound though and I’m sure the insurance will cover most of the repairs. Lucky next month’s yarns hadn’t arrived yet, huh? And since you got the bus this morning, they didn’t even have to move your car. A bunch of the others had to be towed.”

She broke out of his embrace for a moment.

“Loki, your stuff. All your things!”

He shrugged. “I didn’t have much. I can replace it all.”

“Your baby blanket…”

He stiffened slightly at that. “I can make another one. A better one, since I’ll know what I’m doing this time. It’s just things, Darcy. It’s alright.”

He drew her close to him again, letting her cry softly into his shirt. Saying it was ‘just things’ was all very well, but the store was pretty much her life. And now she’d have to start nearly from scratch again.

A hand rested gently on her shoulder. Steve.

“Darcy, I’m going to head home, and I just wanted to know if you want to come with me.”

“No. Sorry.”

“That’s alright. I just don’t think you should be alone tonight.”

She hesitated. Her first reaction was to cling tighter to Loki, trying to prove to herself that he was really there. But she also remembered what Bucky had said about Steve being occasionally jealous.

“Jane,” she said eventually. “Where’s Jane? I want Jane to come home with me.”

She hadn’t noticed Jane and Thor standing nearby until she heard Jane’s voice, taking control of a difficult situation as she so often did.

“OK, I’ll stay with you, Thor can take Loki back to our place. There’s a camp bed in the hall closet. Steve, can you get a taxi?”

“Sure thing.” He bent down awkwardly to kiss Darcy’s cheek where she nestled against Loki’s chest. “I’ll call you tomorrow to make sure you’re alright.”

Darcy let herself be bundled back into Thor’s car, Jane holding her hand across the back seat. Let herself be taken into her apartment. Let Jane push a mug of hot chocolate into her hands. Let Jane put her to bed, where she lay for hours in a state of numb uncertainty, Jane gently slumbering next to her.

She wasn’t sure when she’d fallen asleep, but when she woke up Jane was already making breakfast and apologizing that she had to go to work.

“I should… call the insurance people,” Darcy said uncertainly. “See how long before I can start rebuilding.”

“That’s a good idea. Proactive, right?"

But once she’d dug out her paperwork and called to have someone to come assess the damage in the afternoon, she wasn’t sure what to do with herself.

Her fingers hovered above calling Loki, but she thought better of it. She tried Bucky instead.

“Hey.”

“My store burned down last night.”

Perhaps she should have led with an actual greeting, but she almost wanted to just say it out loud.

Bucky paused for a while.

“Any casualties?” he asked.

“No. No one in at the time.”

“Well, that’s something. Do you need… anything?”

“I don’t think so. I just wanted to tell you. Because obviously Friday… Friday can’t happen.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We could always have it at my place. You could come to me for once.”

She considered it. Actually having something definite in her imminent future would help.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that would be great.”

“OK. I’ll see you then.”

She spent the rest of the morning updating the website to reflect that the store would be temporarily closed for repairs and having all the shipments of yarn redirected to her home address. The fuss of cancelling them would be more trouble than it was worth, and she could manage a few boxes around the place. She took a long shower, and took her time getting dressed into old things she didn’t mind getting a bit grubby.

Eventually, when she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer, she headed to the bus stop to get to where the remains of her business stood. She didn’t trust herself to drive.


	16. Chapter 16

The Yarn Barn and the surrounding buildings looked like the ribs of some great felled beast, but strangely not as devastating in the midday light as they had in the dark.

Next door was still cordoned off, but she was allowed through the barrier to her own business. And she was informed that her assistant was already there.

She found Loki wearing rubber gloves and over-sized sweatpants, picking through the debris.

“Borrowed some of Thor’s old clothes,” he said in answer to her unspoken question as she crossed the threshold. “Just wanting to see if there’s anything salvageable.”

“And is there?”

He gestured to a small pile. “Some of the metal needles have survived. I think with a bit of cleaning they’d be alright. Obviously the wooden ones are gone, and the yarn must have caught and burnt up pretty quickly, along with the paperwork.”

She was hesitant to ask what she knew she had to now. “And your stuff? Anything made it out alive from up there?”

He sighed. “Well, some of the furniture is still recognizable, but only just. What the fire and smoke didn’t get, the fire hose has made pretty well unusable. And then there’s this…”

He produced a large plastic blob from behind some garbage bags.

“Any idea what this is?” he asked, eyes sparkling slightly.

She reached out and took the object from him. It was mostly black, but some of that rubbed off onto her fingers revealing pale pink sections and bits of glitter.

“Oh my god,” she said suddenly. “It’s your sex toys. They’ve melted together…”

A giggle escaped her lips. She couldn’t help it. She was soon laughing hysterically, wiping off as much soot as she could.

“I am so keeping this,” she said. “I’m going to use it as an ornament. Assuming none of it’s too obviously phallic.”

“They’re certainly pretty well disinfected right now.”

She was still snorting when the insurance representative arrived. He walked around, scuffing his feet slightly against the still-wet floor.

“Yeah, it’s a typical clean-up job, this,” he said eventually. “We’ll get some contractors in to gut the place in the next couple of days, replace the glass, that kind of thing. I’m afraid your contract only covers the purchase of furniture and interior decoration, not the work, so you’ll be on your own for painting and getting replacement interior items. If you’ll step outside, I have the necessary paperwork in my van for you to sign.”

There was something undeniably strange about wiping soot from her hands with a tissue under the man’s slightly disapproving gaze while still clutching an impromptu silicone center piece. He drove away pretty quickly after that.

“So we don’t have to clear this lot up, right? Someone will come do that?” Loki asked.

“Apparently we’re not meant to, just in case there’s anything unsafe here. Asbestos and stuff probably.”

“Right. So we should go home?”

She looked at him, amazed to find not even a trace of sadness in his face. He could have been hiding it though.

“This was your home,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

“But… What are you doing to do?”

He sniffed. “Stay at Thor’s. Help you rebuild. Go to IKEA, get myself new furniture. Stuff that’s actually mine. Maybe even a couch this time. Get everything back to normal. Better than normal, you were always saying that you hated the yellow walls. Now you can pick out whatever color you want.”

“You’re so optimistic today.”

“Yeah, well. I guess I’m thinking about the future as a better place for once. Because we’re going to get through this. We are. Trust me.”

She nodded, wishing she felt as sure as he did.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to Thor and Jane’s. They’ve got really nice coffee, which clearly we deserve to drink because of trauma.”

Darcy hesitated in the doorway, looking back at the blackened remains. A gloved hand slipped into hers.

“Come on,” Loki repeated. “I wish it could be repaired just from you looking at it, but it can’t. It’ll be a while, but you’ll get there. I know you will.”

She sighed, took one last look at her poor ruined store, and followed Loki away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be a part five, but I decided to stop here, on a turning point.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who keeps reading and leaving feedback of all kinds, I really do appreciate it.


End file.
